After spending several years doing QA for games, I took the next logical step: critiquing them. Even though the Xbox One is my preferred weapon of choice, I'll play and review just about any game from any genre on any system.

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Xbox One Review - 'Dead Rising 3' The Last Agent DLC

Set 10 years after Dead Rising 2, Dead Rising 3 takes place in Los Perdidos amid a zombie outbreak that's about to decimate mankind.

So far, the DLC for Dead Rising 3 has failed to capture what was good about the main game. Operation Broken Eagle was rather rote, with a campaign and protagonist that failed to elicit an emotion other than boredom. Fallen Angel had a slightly intriguing character to go along with a marginally better adventure. Chaos Rising threw away any sense of progress, as a character with lots of potential was reduced to a mere errand boy with a campaign that was equally as dull and insulting — one of the missions simply asked you to wait around aimlessly for an event to occur. With the track record so far, expectations for the final piece of DLC, The Last Agent, are very low. While it doesn't do anything to dramatically make the season pass worthwhile, it does provide a decent way to end the adventure.

In The Last Agent, you play Brad Park, a ZDC agent who is on his deathbed and about to turn into the very thing he was sworn to kill. Against his better judgment, main character Nick saves you from that fate and gives you a dose of Zombrex to prevent you from turning. With a new lease on life, you instinctively get back on duty and try to reach a doctor friend to save more people from the outbreak.

Judging by character alone, Brad falls into the same category as Adam Kane. As an agent with a sense of duty and doing what's right, he's quite bland, and nothing really makes him stand out as a character. What saves him is the story, particularly how it ties together the major parts of the DLC and the main tale. The payoff doesn't occur until the end of the game, and it isn't that big of a revelation, but the effort is appreciated.

The main missions are the same types that we've already seen in the DLC thus far, but a few changes make them somewhat enjoyable this time around. The two missions that bookend the DLC require vehicle transportation without blowing it up, but you have an item that provides some more vehicular toughness, so the missions are more tolerable. A number of the fetch quests ask you to retrieve items through combat, and most are in plain sight, so you aren't scouring for something obscure while you're being attacked from all sides. The escort mission works well enough only because the person you're accompanying has a nice gun and uses it liberally. There's even a waiting mission, but it's not as bad as what was seen in Chaos Rising, since the wait time is very short. The DLC still errs on the short side for the main campaign missions, but their active nature makes them feel fine instead of boring.

The side missions are much more improved. Two have you hunting things in the environment, like finding all the stashes of bootleg Zombrex and discovering infected corpse piles to burn. Like all of the other hunting missions, they can feel tedious even though some of the corpse piles seem to set themselves off at random times, making your job a bit easier. Rescuing survivors is much more enjoyable since they appear anywhere on the map, just like in the main game, so the spontaneity is fun. Also nice is the side mission that asks you to retrieve extra Zombrex chips from king zombies. While the battles aren't that tough, there are more than enough chips to go around, so the only way you won't succeed is if you ignore it altogether. For those still building their way to level 50, these missions make that task much easier to accomplish.

The new items aren't inventive, but the lack of creativity is forgiven due to their power. The only melee weapon available is a pneumatic hammer, which not only bashes zombies with a gas-powered punch but also makes their corpses fly away. Everything else is simply a gun. There's a gun that shoots fire grenades that do a poor job of killing zombies in one hit but is excellent when making sure everyone in the blast radius is set on fire. There's an ice rocket launcher that does something similar but freezes enemies for shattering instead. The railgun is your standard powerful projectile weapon while the Pacifier is a modified railgun that makes zombie heads explode. Then there's a jet turbine engine that is more of a defensive weapon than an offensive one, since you use the air power to push the undead away from you instead of killing them. The new construction weapon is a flamethrower that freezes zombies in their paths, and the new vehicle is a large ZDC truck that has a freezing grenade launcher and is extremely tough. Driving around the city is more enjoyable, since you can mow down tons of zombies before the truck starts smoking. Overall, this DLC provides a fun arsenal for those who love projectile weaponry.

The Last Agent is right up there with Fallen Angel as the best of the DLC packs available for Dead Rising 3. Considering the issues that still occur here, such as lots of fetch quests and vehicle missions in such a short time period, that's not saying much. However, the weapons in this pack are very nice, and most of the side-quests aren't annoying. Though the character isn't very interesting, at least his story makes sense in the world of Los Perdidos. It isn't exactly a ringing endorsement for players to pick up the DLC, but if you already have the season pass, it wouldn't hurt to spend some time with this pack.